Exploring mapped network drives is way too slow

I have a network with about twenty-five nodes. All the machines are Windows 98 boxes except two which have Windows 2000. When exploring network drives on the two Windows 2000 boxes, windows explorer stops responding for a couple of minuets and then begins responding agian until another file or directory is accessed then explorer stops responding again for a few minutes. This makes for very slow browsing and is very annoying. Does anyone know if this is a Windows 2000 problem or network. Oh, by the way the network is NT4, BackOffice Server. This doesn't occur on the 98 boxes. Any Ideas?

Try disabling the computer browser service on the windows 2000 computers. This can be done in start->control panel->administrative tools->services.
Go to the computer browser service and open it. Change the startup type to disabled and reboot.

Also can you go to a command prompt on the windows 2000 computers and type "browstat status" and post the results.

Right-click the subkey {D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF} and click delete. (Do this on ALL Win2k and WinXP machines on the network - or you won't notice any increase in speed.)

You may wish to save this key before deleting it..this will speed up your network browsing by about oh I don't know 100% or so..and if you don't have huge amounts of files you may want to turn off indexing, I set my to manual with NO noticeable performance loss

click start button\run\type in "services.msc", locate indexing service, dblclick it, stop the service and use drop down menu to set it to manual. Reboot after all this.

OH, I couldn't browse my network when I dsabled the computer browser service...? When I re-enabled it I could browse the network...must've been some type of glitch I guess...I got win2kserver and four workstations(two win2kPro and two win98se), small I know, but a complete network all the same.

I disabled it on a network with one 40 nt workstations and two 2000 servers. They were having browsing problems and I ended up calling microsoft and they told me to disable the computer browser service on all of the workstations.

Windows 2000 has terrible performance on networks without local DNS servers. I'm betting that in a mostly win98 network you don't have one. Setup your domain controller or any member server with DNS (only a forward lookup zone is necessary) and then you will see your browse times go down. The reason your Win98 boxes don't see the lag is because they use Netbios for resolution.